Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Our reviews and thoughts on the latest releases, classics, and nostalgic favourites. Things we loved, things we hated, and worst of all, things we were ambivalent about.

Christmas Wonderland

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Heidi moved to New York to be an artist but ended up excelling in a position as art gallery curator, her paints mostly forgotten. Her sister needs a favour close to the holidays – she needs an overnight babysitter for her two kids, so Heidi finagles some time off work to return to small town Pleasant Valley and spend some time with her niece and nephew.

While there, Heidi isn’t just a babysitter, but the defacto Christmas mom too, fulfilling all the holiday duties her sister is signed up for. She has to bake cookies, take the kids to pageant rehearsal, and volunteer for the Snowball dance. And guess what! The Snowball dance is being organized by her former high school sweetheart Chris, who is now her nephew’s teacher and hockey coach. While not the obvious choice for Snowball volunteer, the truth is, Chris and Heidi are both Snowball royalty – they were Snowball king and queen back when they were young and in love.

Although she’s badly needed back at work, of course Heidi’s stay with the kids gets extended. And while she’s there, she gets out paints and canvas that she’s apparently had stashed there for years (?) and gets busy IN HER SISTER’S ALL BEIGE LIVING ROOM. I mean, there isn’t even an ugly-patterned couch to help hide the inevitable stains. Her apron suggests that only a small fraction of paint actually makes it to the canvas, but she’s going to risk the wall to wall carpeting in someone else’s house? Really, Heidi? I’m such a messy painter that I once accidentally dripped some pain on my dog Herbie, then a frisky puppy, when I was refurbishing a dresser. When I later made an appointment to take him to his first vet visit, they asked me lots of questions over the phone – how many weeks old, what breed, what colour – to which I responded, white, black, and teal, which technically, pre-bath, he was. I explained the joke and how it came to be, but when we turned up to the vet days later, teal had made it into his official file, and remains there to this day.

Anyway, there’s very little romance in this romantic Christmas movie. There’s very little to recommend it, period. There’s not even a cute, off-colour dog. But if you’re looking for cute, Hallmark does have quite a deep well, so visit us here!

Amelie

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Sean and I are celebrating our wedding anniversary in Paris; today we’re actually renewing our wedding vows at the Eiffel Tower so I’m posting about a wonderfully romantic French film about love and life in Paris through the eyes of an idealistic and imaginative young woman.

Gloriously known as Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (translation: The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain), this film introduced the rest of the world to Audrey Tautou, seemingly born to play the role though it was actually written specifically for Emily Watson, who turned it down because she doesn’t speak French. A passion project for director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, he’s been collecting the various memories and curiosities that make up the story of Amélie since 1974. Who knew that the guy who brought us Alien: Resurrection had such magic and whimsy in him?

Amélie was brought up in a rather protected fashion, her father being very concerned about her supposed heart condition. To make up for her isolation, a young Amélie lives in her imagination, and her grown-up self is still very much a dreamer, a wondrous observer and devoutly introverted. She devotes her life to making others happy, and lucky for us, she’s surrounded by a very quirky bunch.

For her father, she fulfills his lifelong dream of travel (tough for a recluse) by stealing his treasured lawn gnome and sending it all over the world. This was inspired by true events – in fact, a rash of pranks perpetrated in the 1990s in England and France.

The traveling gnome was inspired by a rash of similar pranks played in England and France in the 1990s. In fact, the theft of garden gnomes is so pervasive it even has a name – “gnoming.” A gnome is taken from someone’s garden and released back “into the wild” (wherever that is for an inanimate object – the shelves of Walmart?). In 1997, a the leader of the Garden Gnome Liberation Front was convicted of stealing over 150 gnomes – his prison sentence was suspended, but he did pay a hefty fine. (A couple of years later, there was a “mass suicide” of garden gnomes in a small town in France – residents woke up to find 11 gnomes hanging from a bridge, swinging from the nooses around their necks). At any rate, Amélie was responsible for bringing the whole garden gnome kidnapping thing to our attention, and the idea was later used by Travelocity in an ad campaign.

Although the movie is shot in a dreamy sort of way, with Paris polished, glowing, and blemish-free, some of the locations can actually be found in Montmartre. The cafe where Amélie works, for example, can be found on Rue Lepic (and is conveniently also named “Les Deux Moulins”). The fruit store run by M. Collignon is at 56 rue des Trois Frères. And of course the church where Amélie’s mother is crushed to death by a suicidal jumper is none other than the uber-famous Notre Dame cathedral.

Amélie’s watchful neighbour paints the same painting yearly – he’s up to 40 copies of Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, and he still hasn’t got the girl-drinking-water’s expression quite right. Pierre-Auguste Renoir is a French artist of the impressionist variety and I’m looking forward to ogling his stuff at the Museé de l’Orangerie, but that particular painting can actually be found in The Phillipps Collection in Washington, DC.

If you haven’t seen this, you should, and if you have, no time like the present for a re-watch!

Gideon’s Army

Audrey Hepburn In Paris

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Audrey Hepburn’s iconic look, by Givenchy

This week will be the tale of two Assholes in Paris – Sean and Jay are there on vacation. They’re posting about various movies set in Paris (On Valentine’s day they were at Le Moulin Rouge – guess which movie the reviewed? Check it out below). Today we’re covering several movies, each of them revolving around a quintessential French star (who was actually American) – Audrey Hebpurn.

: Hepburn in Sabrina – a classic French look

Sabrina is one of my favourite Audrey movies. It’s not really set in Paris, but it does open there, with Sabrina at a French cooking school. Today Sean and I are also at a French cooking school, learning to make delicious macarons (Earl Grey and milk chocolate, and white chocolate and raspberry, if the syllabus is to be believed).

Sabrina is the chauffeur’s daughter who attracts the attention of the family’s playboy son (William Holden). He’s interested because she’s fresh and beautiful, but despite his ardour, she’s really be a better match for the older son, a serious business type (Humphrey Bogart). Fuck the plot though, this film is significant because it marks the beginning of

Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina – dress by Givenchy

a great collaboration between Audrey Hepburn and Hubert de Givenchy. He’d never heard of her when she first showed up in his French salon, assumed it must be Katharine Hepburn, in fact. But it was the start of a beautiful relationship. He supplied designs and dresses for her to wear in the film, and continued to do so for most of her career. The awkward thing is that the Academy gave the Oscar for costume design to Edith Head when in fact the outfits were created by Givenchy and personally selected by Hepburn.

Givenchy of course created her iconic look in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and started being credited

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

for providing her wardrobe in the credits. Audrey has said “His are the only clothes in which I am myself. He is far more than a couturier, he is a creator of personality.”

At the Louvre – Audrey in Funny Face

Funny Face saw Audrey back in Paris again, this time because she’d been discovered as a frumpy bookshop clerk and turned into a high fashion model and whisked away to Paris to wear sumptuous dresses in elegant locations – running down the steps of the Louvre waving a scarf of red chiffon;

fishing on a barge on the Seine in cropped suit and straw hat; dashing through the Jardin des Tuileries in a cap-sleeved black dress.

Funny Face

Audrey in Charade

Charade saw Audrey dressed in a lot of coats, smart suits, and trenches – perfect for drizzly Paris weather. It’s both a romance and a mystery set in the

Givenchy’s aesthetic for ‘Charade’

city of light as poor Audrey is chased through Paris by men wanting the fortune that her murdered husband stole. Things are complicated but she always looks chic and put together. Givenchy focused on classic but straight lines, ushering a new aesthetic into the 60s.

Paris When It Sizzles is not Hepburn’s best movie. She stars as a secretary sent to type up a writer’s manuscript for his new movie, but she arrives: no script! She helps him get over his writer’s block by reenacting (I guess it’s more like fantasy sequences) different plot possibilities. The movie may not have worked, but Hepburn’s wardrobe sure did (although let’s not question how a she could

Paris When It Sizzles

afford couture on a secretary’s salary). Givenchy was inspired by Paris in the spring to use a sorbet-coloured palette. He was also the first to receive a screen credit for a scent – Ms. Hepburn’s wardrobe AND perfume, it said, though I don’t think audiences could tell the difference. Still, how positively Parisian.

Givenchy has her all in white

How To Steal A Million is also set in Paris. It’s a comedy-caper with stereotypical French art forgeries and museum heists. Audrey is a smart and sexy woman of the 60s, and above all, well-dressed. Her many stylish outfits led to co-star Peter O’Toole to quip, in character, during a scene

Givenchy frames her face

when Audrey is disguised as a cleaning lady,”it gives Givenchy the night off”.

Midnight in Paris

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Establishing shots at the beginning of the film are divine, and if I wasn’t in Paris already, I’d be booking my flight! Funny how the toast of Manhattan, consummate New Yorker Woody Allen, now seems to be smitten with Paris. Is the City of Light his new inspiration?

Owen Wilson is quite taken with Paris in the 1920s. He’s a writer who’s spent years grinding out scripts in Hollywood (successfully, it seems) but wishes he’d had the guts to write novels in Paris instead. He’s visiting the city with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams), who’s had enough (“If I never see another charming boulevard or bistro -) but he’s still bubbling with anecdotes of Monet and Hemingway and their fruitful time lost in their art. While he’s out chasing the ghost of Joyce down cobbled streets, the clock strikes midnight and an old Peugeot drives up, full of merry-makers. Turns out – spoiler alert – that it’s Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

We never know whether this is magic or mental health, but he now possesses the ability to slip back to his favourite time period, 20s era Paris, and he gets invited into Gertrude Stein’s (Kathy Bates) famous salon. Bates is lovely but I have to say, Wilson’s earnestness is what really sells this piece. He’s wide-eyed and worshipful of his heroes. It’s major wish-fulfillment and it’s fun to see all these giants come to life.

Rachel McAdams starts to get annoyed that he disappears every night, but how can he resist? Hemingway himself has offered to edit his work! Woody Allen’s script sings with treasures for book-lovers, and in this film, I can combine with my love of literature AND film (AND Paris, incidentally). Owen Wilson is just as bowled over – particularly when he comes across a beautiful muse (and mistress) to many famous artists (Marion Cotillard), but what a conflict between his actual fiancée in the present tense, and the people who get him but may just be figments of his fertile imagination.

This movie is not for everyone and that’s okay. And it’s not just about being well-read. You just either feel the charm or you don’t. Allen sprinkles the scrip liberally with treats that add up to a veritable feast (a moveable feast?) – you get the sense that he must have had fun writing this, which is perhaps why he won the Oscar for Best Orignal Screenplay (though he never attends to pick up his statuettes). If any of the above has sounded interesting, or if you just need another excuse to fall in love with the City of Possibility, then put this on your list.

Last Tango in Paris

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If you notice a theme here over the next 10 days, you’re both perceptive and right. I’m off to Paris and to celebrate, I’ll be posting – guess what? – reviews of movies set in Paris! Mais oui!

I must be in a weird mood, and I’m trying not to read into the fact that the first Paris movie I thought was none other than the craziest of crazies: Last Tango in Paris. If you’ve seen it, you can’t forget it. Marlon Brando plays Paul, a man mourning his wife’s suicide. He meets a young woman, Jeanne (Maria Schneider), when they both view the same apartment with intention to rent. They begin fucking. It was a “no strings attached” relationship before those words really existed. So stringless in fact that Paul insists they share absolutely no personal information, not even first names. The affair continues, graphically, for quite some time, until one day Jeanne shows up to find the apartment empty and Paul gone, without a word of goodbye.

But the story doesn’t end there! They meet again, on the street, and this time Paul, in his grief, spills his story, but Jeanne finds that this loss of anonymity is not exactly to her liking, disillusioning in fact.

Director Bernardo Bertolucci was inspired by his own sexual fantasies to make this film. He opens it with two paintings by Francis Bacon, which he visited frequently in real life at the Grand Palais Royal. The film’s palette draws heavily from the colours in these paintings, which reminded Bertolucci of Paris in the winter. He had lofty ambitions for the film, inspired by great art, but what he turned out was instead akin more to pornography?

Why? Because both stars felt “violated and raped” by the process. Maria Schneider, young and naive at the time of filming, felt manipulated into filming some of the more graphic scenes, including one in which Jeanne is sodomized (butter being the infamous lubricant of choice) but the “real tears” are Maria’s, who felt humiliated. Her shock and revulsion make it impossible not to feel guilty by association. Brando was so incensed that he refused to speak to Bertolucci for 15 years after filming wrapped.

Opening in 1972, of course there was great controversy. People in Paris faced weeks of lineups since foreigners from neighbouring countries with greater censorship laws flocked to see it where they could. In New Jersey, protestors called “Pervert!” to those who dared to see it, and the viewing prompted housewives to apparently “vomit in disgust.”

Nevertheless, the film was undeniably ground-breaking and free, and 40 years later, we’re still talking about it.

The Boy Next Door

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This is not a good movie. If you want to see a good movie, go to any other movie and there’s a chance it might be good. There’s not a hope in heaven of this one being decent but if you’ve simply come to worship at the altar of Jennifer Lopez, buy your ticket and prepare to feast your eyes.

Ms. Lopez plays a high school teacher with a teenage son and a cheating ex-husband. So right off the bat, you don’t buy it. There’s no school board in the world who’d think it a good idea to let her smoulder in spike heels and a clingy pencil skirt in front of hormonal teenage boys on a daily basis. She inspires lust with every bat of her long lashes and apparently routinely wears sexy lingerie under her clothes, yet her husband’s going to wander? Okay, yeah, it happens. Men cheat for all kinds of stupid reasons. It’s just a weird casting decision to go with an iconic sex goddess as the scorned, middle-aged wife. And it’s nearly as baffling to cast John Corbett as the philandering husband since he’s basically America’s puppy dog. He exudes charm and loyalty and together-foreverness.

So, their marriage is on the rocks. They’re living separately but not quite at the letting-go stage, which is a fine time for a hunky, strapping young man to move in next door (Ryan Guzman). The camera pays close-up attention to his slick muscles to the exclusion of unimportant details like his face. This guy is just a body for hire. A body, meet The Body.

But guess what! Affairs be complicated, especially the May-December ones. Except it’s Jennifer Lopez, and this guy is the same age as most of the guys she dates in real life. But let’s face it, if you were a high schooler who got to bag J-Lo, wouldn’t you do everything you could to keep it going? At least long enough to invite her to prom, right?

Supposedly this film turns into a “thriller” but there aren’t a lot of thrills. But did the screenwriter maybe pick up a big box of clichés for a dime a piece at a garage sale? Yes, those are abundant. In fact, I think she may have just cut up a lot of second-tier scripts, and pasted them back together haphazardly to make something the writers’ room at Days of Our Lives wouldn’t see fit to air. Every time someone opens their mouth, gouda falls out. Oh who am I kidding? It’s more like spray cheez and Guzman just about drenches us with it during his so-called seduction scene. The dialogue is so cheesy I wished I could have just turned the volume off. Because let’s face it. Jenny from the block is down to her black lace panties and we didn’t come here for the talking. Unfortunately, Lopez is trying to turn us on by mewling. I’m certain that in real life she has sex like the bombshell she is, but her “acting” sounds more like a little girl sneezing than a grown woman coming.

The best part about this movie is that I saw it during a weekday matinée in South Keys, just about the only cinema in Ottawa showing daytime movies anymore. Such a shame, because you’ve never seen such a diverse group of characters than those pointed at the screen. A woman seated a few rows behind me tsk’ed the whole way through. You know that clucking sound old women make when they’re disapproving? It’s usually a series of tsks – this particular woman did 5 in a row, and did them at everything. She seemed to be more disapproving of reckless driving than murder so I don’t know what her deal was or why she felt the need to CONSTANTLY share it with the theatre (probably 3-4 dozen times during a 90 minute movie) but boy do I love non-verbal editorializing from strangers. Love! Almost as much as I loved hearing from the woman sitting two seats away from me, who came in late and respected the buffer my coat draped across an empty seat implied but just talked louder to compensate. During a scene involving a very large epi pen I cringed and looked away. She practically fell out of her seat to comfort me. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said, arms flapping, no thought to anyone trying to actually watch the movie. “I’ve seen it before” she says “and it turns out okay.” Colour me relieved. Wait- what? You know how bad this movie is and you paid to see it again? Exactly how many times has she seen this? Enough that she now has a rapport with Lopez – she yells to her “It’s your own fault!” and when this fails to elicit a response she turns to me and yells “It’s her own fault!” and when this also fails to elicit a response (other than my shrinking down further in my seat) she turns back to the screen and tries again “It’s your own fault!” Oh that Jennifer Lopez. She never learns.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

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Maybe my expectations were too high. Which is a bit weird to say because Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a comic book movie, so basically I should have known what I was going to get. And as a comic book movie, it does its job. It gives us lots of really fast and strong heroes who jump out of planes and off buildings, endless bad guys with unlimited bullets who shoot at those heroes for half the movie, and a head bad guy with a mask and metal arm who may not even be the mastermind behind all this mayhem. What it does not give us, and why I was ultimately let down, is any real change to the formula that we have seen from Marvel in its ten (ten!) movies and counting. It’s all the same and it’s getting a little tired.

The problem is, I’m a comic book guy and an action movie guy. I should have enjoyed this movie a lot more than I did. I’m still excited to see Avengers 2 and Guardians of the Galaxy 2. But now I’m a lot less excited. I wonder, am I just going to get a rehash of what I’ve seen before like I did in Captain America 2, a story that really begins at the same place it started without advancing the greater plot I thought was underlying these movies in the Marvel Universe? Before watching this movie I had felt that maybe I should go back and watch the Captain America movies as well as the two Thor movies, but now I feel confident I don’t need to and certainly don’t have any desire to since this movie was so forgettable and so self-contained.

shield punch

Is this just a middling installment in the Marvel movie juggernaut? Or is it a sign that we’ve used up all the good ideas for now and it’s time to wait for the inevitable reboots of all these characters, since their origins are the only stories from which Hollywood can consistently make decent movies? I guess we’ll have a better idea in just a few months because Avengers: Age of Ultron opens May 1 and Ant-Man follows shortly after. My gut says making a movie about Ant-Man is overkill at this point, and then I look and see that there are 16 more Marvel-related movies (including Fox and Sony ones) scheduled to come out between now and 2019. That’s way too many. One a year might be too many. The worst part is, I know there are better movies to be made that have been passed over in favour of these big-budget, low-risk, no-art movies. I would like to have seen those and 18 more Marvel movies, plus whatever DC is doing, is a poor trade and a loss for all of us.

Big picture aside, I’m still not satisfied with what I was given here. This movie is a tolerable distraction but leaves you with nothing memorable. It gets five indestructible shields out of ten.

Brick

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Back in December, I reviewed Mysterious Skin, Looper, and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For and made no secret of my Joseph Gordon-Levitt bias. It all started with Brick. I exited the theater when I first saw it back in 2006 certain that this was an actor to watch out for and refusing to listen to my friend’s allegations that this was in fact the same kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun.

Watching it again nearly a decade later, Brick feels a bit like a feature length high school video project- complete with an extremely low budget and a high school serving as the unlikely setting for a Maltese Falcon-style detective story. JGL plays a loner named Brendan who must navigate the seedy underworld of his school to solve his ex-girlfriend’s murder. The dialogue, music, and twists seem to come from a bizarre 40s noir. Instead of a meddling cop, we get a nagging vice-principal.

Just like in the Leonardo DiCaprio version of Romeo and Juliet, first time writer-director Rian Johnson (who JGL later worked with again on Looper) relies on the anachronisms in the discourse to make an old story feel new. This gives him an excuse to tell a pretty straightforward detective story without it feeling like just another detective story. I’ll admit his style takes some getting used to and I was completely thrown off at first back in 2006. But once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to get caught up in Johnson’s surreal picture of a modern high school. Sure, they don’t talk like real teenagers but they never do in the movies anyway. At least Brick is fun to listen to.

Brick runs just a little bit longer than the novelty of Johnson’s gimmick and there are a couple of times too many where he uses self-parody as a bit of a crutch. The film really works best when it’s reminding us that the darkest of secrets can be hidden within the walls of our publc schools. You’ll either love the film’s style or you’ll hate it but JGL sold it for me. He always strikes just the right note and, like the movie itself, has one foot in the past and the other in the present. He has the look of a modern troubled teenager with the soul of Sam Spade. Nearly a decade later, I am still always looking forward to his next project.

Still Alice

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We wouldn’t even be talking about Still Alice, about a world renowned linguistics professor who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, if it weren’t for Julianne Moore. Michelle Pfeiifer, Julia Roberts, and Nicole Kidman all apparently passed on the part before anyone got around to considering Moore, which is baffling to me. Who among Moore’s peers is more up for the challenge? Who can play confused just as well as they can play sharp or as vulnerable as well as strong. Or, as Jay was right to point out in her review of Maps to the Stars, who else is so unconcerned with how she looks while she’s doing it? Because there are so many sides to her persona, we believe her as a respected academic, as a mother, and as a wife which is just as important as believing her as an Alzheimer’s patient. Because of Julianne Moore, we’re talking about Still Alice as an Oscar nominated film (Best Actress in a Leading Role).

The movie, as written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, may not be as beautiful as Away from Her or L’Amour but it gets it right mostly by not doing anything wrong. It’s never corny and doesn’t search for easy answers. This may not seem like high praise but I can imagine so many ways this could have gone wrong by being too pandering or by focusing on the disease instead of the person. I give it credit for not falling into these traps.

Julianne Moore is still the best reason to see Still Alice though. She’s been great since short Cuts but hasn’t had such a great opportunity to show it for years. Smart money is on her winning the Oscar.

If one asshole’s opinion isn’t enough, check out Jay’s review.